Ten million on NHS waiting lists’ and “Ten million new UK arrivals’ - The health service and immigration leading the election debate. - video Dailymotion

Dr Steve McCabe, Associate Professor at Birmingham City University with analysis of the big events of the UK General Election.

Transcript

00:00 Clearly there's not an overall strategy apart from the fact that we're calling a surprise

00:04 election and hoping to keep everyone on their toes and catching them by surprise, which

00:09 dare I say has done, but Labour have been preparing for this for a long time. So if

00:14 Sonnac has been gap prone and it's falling apart at the edges, Darmus' performance has

00:19 been stayed in so far as people are expecting big things from the Labour Party, but of course

00:25 Labour are absolutely committed to promising nothing in particular, so promise little and

00:31 maybe over deliver.

00:32 Key campaign issues include immigration policies and the newly announced junior doctor strike.

00:39 The government faces criticism over handling these crises, impacting voter sentiment.

00:45 Quite clearly the NHS is in big crisis. There's indications that the waiting list is something

00:51 like 10 million. It doesn't look good for Sonnac who are presiding over this mess. Labour

00:56 are promising they're going to do 40,000 extra procedures a day. It's not going to touch

01:00 the science.

01:01 And turning to immigration, it's very notable that Nigel Farage, who is not standing in

01:06 this election, he was in Dover on Tuesday and was making a great play about immigration

01:12 to this exclusion of everything else it seemed to me, and making a big issue of the small

01:19 vote, but also more particularly an issue that sort of resonates with a lot of potential

01:23 voters. According to him there's been something like 10 million people extra in this country,

01:28 but of course the point he made is that where are the additional resources in terms of housing,

01:33 the health service and a whole set of other public service issues that are experiencing

01:37 some problems.

01:38 Recent UK opinion polls indicate that Labour is leading significantly over the Conservatives.

01:44 Look, I mean the only opinion poll or the only vote that really counts is the one that's

01:49 going to happen on the 4th of July. It's an interesting election and dare I say anything

01:52 can happen, but we still sort of believe come the 5th of July we will have a Labour government

01:57 under sort of Keir Starmer.